On April 9, 2015, Journalist David Levesley interviewed composer/pianist Elizabeth Myers in advance of the premiere of her new music/dance collaboration with choreographer Julia K. Gleich. Their collaboration a featured performance in Norte Maar’s CounterPointe3.

October 26, 2012. Aegis Live Arts performed with Albion Baroque Orchestra in an evening of Musick in Britain: The Italian Heritage. Conductor and Director, Miguel Esteban, founder of Albion Baroque, invited Aegis to dance alongside the orchestra to Charles Avison’s concerto grosso no.11 in G major. Dancers, Michelle Buckley, Chiara Favaretti and Fenella Kennedy, negotiated the aisles of the church in choreography by Julia K Gleich, and the concert was followed with dessert, Gingerbread from an Eighteenth Century recipe. In a review of the event, Prasanthi Matharu of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Music, cheered this inaugural performance!

It is hard to believe that Norte Maar’s original ballet The Brodmann Areas has finished its final run at the Center For Performance Research. With a cross-genre, multi-media collaborative approach to developing the original ballet – and its accompanying visual and audio components – the countdown to opening was highlighted in the advance press:

Bushwick Daily featured a preview that included a conversation with choreographer Julia Gleich, which can be found here. Joined by director Jason Andrew, as well as the Brodmann‘s crew of dancers, Gleich also spoke with WNYU’s CityWide arts and culture program. CityWide stopped by during the last day of rehearsal to get the details on what host Lucas Green calls “a particularly visceral collaborative product.” For audio, please click here.

Critic James Panero of The New Criterion also found plenty to ponder in this brainy performance. His review of Brodmann Areas in the May Issue of the publication offers a comparison with last years ballet:

“With visual artists, sound artists, and dancers all coming together, last year was something of a celebratory free-for-all, a sprawling jam session with one guitar hero after the next compounding the awesomeness until your thoughts turned to the line at the Porta-John. “Brodmann,” in contrast, took on the subject of cognition and didn’t dance around the big thoughts. Tight, far more spare than a year before, the performance brought the dance up front while still collaborating with Bushwick artists such as Paul D’Agostino, who created rapid projections out of his triptych cardboard collages. This time Ryan Anthony Francis, as musical director, also arranged a score to link the various parts into a coherent theme.”

Panero ends with a nod to the collaboration between director/choreographer Julia Gleich and neural scientist Denis Pelli on peripheral vision. Panero’s complete review can be found here. For Panero’s review from last year’s production, In the Use of Others for the Change click here.

The Brodmann Areas‘ complete program, including more information about the artists and performers involved, can be found here.

On Monday, April 2, Norte Maar held its first public benefit event at the Mitchell-Innes & Nash. The evening celebrated eight years of Norte Maar’s unique programming and collaborative mission. The night also honored Julie Martin of E.A.T. who was introduced by noted curator Barbara London.

“Long before the founding of Norte Maar, myself and the choreographer Julia K Gleich, searched to define the many various artistic projects we partnered to program and present,” explained Norte Maar’s director Jason Andrew in his opening remarks, “Collaboration was always at its core. Applying equal weight to the visual, literary and performing arts, we set out to start an organization that would build community, foster artistic expression and raise the imaginative energy in us all. Now, eight years since our beginning, our commitment to the spontaneous, our concentration on the unique, and our avoidance of the ordinary has never wavered.”

The benefit included pre + post music by DJ JoJo, performances by Andrew J Nemr + CPD Plus with Gordon Au on the horn, David Tudor’s electronic environment masterpiece Rainforest I (1968) performed by Composers Inside Electronics, and a preview of Norte Maar’s upcoming ballet The Brodmann Areas danced by Dylan Crossman, Jace Coronado, Morgan McEwen, and Abbey Roesner. The Brodmann Areas opens April 12. Tickets available here.

“The crowd couldn’t help laughing when the final dancer, Dylan Crossman, raced into the main gallery space filled with [Catherine] Opie’s photographs wearing football pants and a very short tank-top with the American flag printed across its chest,” wrote ARTINFO‘s Benjamin Sutton.

Norte Maar would like to thank all those who contributed their time and talents to make this benefit such a success. We are also very gratefully to all who showed their extraordinary support by donating and contributing to our organization. A special thanks goes out to Lucy Mitchell-Innes and David Nash, Jay Gorney, Lucy Dew, Robert Grossman, and the entire staff at Mitchell-Innes & Nash.

With only a week until opening night, people are already talking about Norte Maar’s original ballet The Brodmann Areas. “You can’t go wrong with so many brilliant artists working together,” says our director Jason Andrew, as quoted by reporter Aaron Short in his preview for The Brooklyn Paper.

The Brodmann Areas, choreographed by our president Julia Gleich, thinks conceptually the gaps and synapses that define the 52 areas designating the regions of the cerebral cortex of the brain. Conjuring a cross-disciplinary vision as Norte Maar continually pursues, Brodmann combines the work of not only a team of dancers, but the visual artsits on set and costumes design. In his piece for The L Magazine, “This Is Your Brain on Dance,” Paul D’Agostino asks, “sounds like a mindful mind-full, no?”

Rouses Piont – The village will once again be center stage for the arts scene in the North Country as Norte Mar for collaborative Projects in the Arts welcomes a host of artists an performers.

The international performing and visual arts company will host “SUMMERDANCE RP:08,” a three-week celebration of the arts, beginning Monday, July 28. The event, now in its fifth year, will consist if two art exhibitions, a site-specific dance performance, the conservatory of dance, collaborative art exchanges for children, and the annual “Fete de Danse” concert featuring regional, national, and international dance comapnies.

Norte Maar’s president, Julia K. Gleich, and Jason Andrew, the organization’s director, originally collaborated n the event in 2004, which has grown each year.

“There was a decision to do it and Jason, in his amazing way, pulled everything together in a relatively short period of time to make his vision happen,” said Julia.

“As an arts collaborative group, Norte Maar has contacts al over the world,” said Andrew. “Focusing on a summer festival of arts and having a home in Rouses Point, it seemed quite elementary to create an event that would intergrate with the enthusiasm of our local community whom we love.”

SUMMERDANCE has garnered consistent interests, with dance and art enthusiasts welcoming its return year after year, said the organizers.

“We had no idea it would be so well-receieved, the first year, though we knew the area din’t have this kind of event and there we certainly a need,” said Gleich.

This year’s event will officially kick off with an open house at Norte Maar’s Rouses Point location at 20 Pratt St., Thursday, July 31. The open house will feature two art exhibition s – “Country Mouse/City Mouse,” which pairs artists from the North County with those of New York City, and “In the Tradition of Ballet Russe,” an exhibition of photographs and memorabilia celebrating the centennial of Diaghilev’s famed Ballet Russe.

SUMMERDANCE will also include something the two call “Off-Set,” which is a dance performance in an non-traditional location. LAst year, Off-Set was held at the Village train station and, in the past, has even included settings such as the from entrance to Wal-Mart in Plattsburgh, adjacent to riding lawn mowers on display.

This year, Off-Set will happen on the same evening as the open house, at the Montgomery Street pier, which Gleich calls, “on of the most spectacular locations on Lake Champlain.”

The pièce de résistance will be Fete de Danse Thursday, August 14 presented in collaboration with the Rouses Point Historical Society. The site of that event is also non-traditional, held at the rink of the Rouses Pointy Civic Center on Lake Street. Gleich, who dances in London and New York City, will provide the featured performance. Other invited guests will also perform on the mixed bill, which will include what is called “the grande march”, when performers and the audience unite on stage.

“After all, where would we be without our supportive and passionate audience,” Andrew asked rhetorically.

Many events will circulate around Fete de Danse, such as a children’s day at the stage, where local daycare children share the stage with professional dancers. Althogether, the events will offer a “rich and varied experience” for those who witness it, said Andrew.

“We love it here and hope that the joy we get being here is shared with people who live here, the people who help make it possible,” said Andrew. “The community comes together and we try to bring an experience that is memorable, that primarily celebrates the community.”

For more information about SUMMERDANCE RP:08, contact Andrew at 314-1516 or visit Norte Maar’s Web site at www.nortemaar.org.

Fete de Danse: An evening of ballet at the Rouses Point Civic Center by Kevin Couture Press-Republican, Out & About, Aug 9, 2007

ROUSES POINT – When Jason Andrew, director of Norte Maar, moved to Rouses Point, he knew he wanted to be involved in his new community.

He had no idea, however, that his dance company would be a key player in the Rouses Point-Champlain Historical Society’s ambitious goal of refurbishing the Delaware & Hudson railroad station on Pratt Street into a museum, information and heritage center.

“We walked over to the Rouses Point Historical Society meeting to introduce ourselves,” Andrew said. “We got involved with the society. So I offered the services of my contacts in the arts to put on a ballet, to do a fundraiser for the society to help them.”

On Thursday, Aug. 16, the company will have its fourth Fete de Danse, an evening of ballet and Irish dancing.

Geri Favreau, president of the Historical Society, remembers when she first heard of ballet coming to the Northern Tier village.

“I thought, wow! Ballet in Rouses Point!”

She said that determination of the volunteers made the fete successful.

“The Historical Society worked together. All the members worked really, really hard. We worked with Jason to make it successful. I think the first year, we had 350 people that came.”

Fundraising aside, such an event is a boon to the Northern Tier, Favreau said.

“I think it fulfills a need in the community and the surrounding area to have that kind of program coming here. You can go to see shows like this in New York City, Montreal, Burlington or even Lake Placid, but to bring it to Rouses Point, I think it just fulfills a need.”

Julie Gleich, a choreographer whose dancers will appear in the show, said “People are more connected here, because everybody is involved.

“When Jason moved here, he asked me if I would join him in producin this big dance event in this unlikely place,” she said, “and this is our fourth summer.”

Echoing the Favreau’s sentiments, Andrew suggested that local residents should take advantage of this one-of-a-kind production.

“It is important for us to make the ballet very accessible, so everyone can come and see the dances. It’s fully produced, and all of the dancers are professionals.”

The collaboration with the Historical Society is a win-win situation, he said.

“It allows us to… to bring in these great dance companies and lets the companies and lets the community experience the best.”

Rouses Point has seen better days. Last fall the town’s number-one employer, Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, announced its impending departure; the drug company employs a tenth of Rouses Point’s 2350 residents and, until recently, ranked as the largest private employer in the North Country. In a recent New York Timesarticle the mayor described the potential impact of the job losses as “Rouses Point’s 9/11.”

Even at the peak of summer boating season, the place has a “bridge to nowhere” feel about it. About a half-dozen empty storefronts, including the downtown Save-A-Lot supermarket, mar the charming but dated business district that runs for several blocks along the west side of Lake Champlain. Yellow caution tape encircles a corner lot piled high with burned wood and rubble — the remains of the landmark Holland Hotel. Last weekend, a group of listless teens walked north past the abandoned stores, toward Canada.